My blog
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CMAT 17
Monday, Apr 13, 2009 11:17AM / Standard Entry
Saturday was the 17th annual Cal Martial Arts Tournament, at Cal Berkeley. For the 4rd year in a row I went, and as the last three years I was solely a spectator. I took some footage, and snapped a few pictures, but I wasn’t into staying from 8am till 11pm running around to each ring trying to film everyone. My experience with that last year solidified the idea that no matter what, someone (usually more than one too) will be unhappy with what you’ve worked hard to do, and I wasn’t interested in repeating that thankless job. You know, things like “You got my score wrong” (I didn’t), “be sure to spell my name right” (that’s hard to do with a resource like Facebook), and “how come you didn’t get X form?”. So, I enjoyed just watching and hanging out with the usual suspects.
Normally, I take BART to Berkeley with an event like this. This year I decided to drive, for a few reasons:
- Taking BART turns a 35 minute drive to a 80-95 minute commute (I normally miss the first train during the transfer)
- BART doesn’t operate all night, and the last few years I’ve had to rush out of CMAT to catch one of the last trains
- BART is still expensive to me
So I ended up parking on Hearst, right next to Wushu West, and walked a good 30 minutes to Cal. I enjoyed it, it was a very peaceful walk, and I enjoyed the mild exercise. The extra bonus is I didn’t have to pay for parking.
I walked in just in time to talk with Connor and his parents (it was about 3:40pm, and he was done for the day) and I unfortunately already missed the Nandu (”difficulty”, all the flashy stuff) division. Chase got a Bronze though, good job. For the first few hours, things were pretty uneventful and it wasn’t until 8pm or so when the advanced divisions went on when things started to pick up again. It was sort of odd not to have Collin and Shahaub compete this year, and it seemed that the entire overall quality of competitors was lower than previous years. Also, there were not as many people from China, you know, the ringers, to completely destroy everyone else. Still, there were some good people, and Anton was very good (he is also new to wushu, which makes it even crazier).
The entire competition lasted till around 11pm. There was a young girl who must have competed in almost 6 or 7 divisions. She was the last female competitor and she did a very good job:
After it was over, I contemplated going over to Marks to watch videos and hang out with everyone, but man it was late, and I had to walk back to my truck. I was also getting a little worried that I may have been towed
I’ve been towed away in the neighborhood before, and even though I asked the person who lived there if it was okay I still felt very uneasy. With that, I made it back to my truck, munching on a free veggie sandwich (it was from the judges lunchroom, they had a bunch left over). The evening was very nice, it was cool and quiet. I made it home at exactly 12am.Those are all the photos (that are worth showing, most of them didn’t come out). I’ll probably upload some of the footage I took to the Wushu West You Tube account later. Or I’ll give it to Mark and let him decide what he wants up there or not.
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Ip Man - Movie Day with Wushu Geeks
Monday, Apr 6, 2009 6:03AM / Standard Entry
It’s long overdue, but Mark, Shahaub and I finally got together for a movie. All three of us are movie geeks. Mark was part of the industry with Jet Li and Rotten Tomatoes, Shahaub is in film school right now (and posted a few demo reels, like this one, on vimeo.com), and I like to watch them and then write about what I watch. Our conversations immediately started off with George Lucas movies, Arrested Development, and then oddly to my fear of Bees and Black Widows. How did we get there?
I figured since they were coming out (of the closet) from Berkeley, I’d prepare lunch for them. We had DELICIOUS cheese steak sandwiches, baked chicken (which Mark provided), and a big salad with Avocado. One thing with those two, is I don’t have to worry about pickyness or food allergies. They will eat anything, and everything on the table
The movie itself was pretty awesome, there are a lot of great fight scenes, and they all prompted Shahaub to imitate the Wing Chun style:
as well as trying to stand up from a kneeling position, using the strength of his feet (as in the movie):
The movie is based on Grandmaster Ip Man (or Yip Man), who was most notable for teaching Bruce Lee Wing Chun. I’m sure there are some artistic liberties taken to make a more entertaining movie, the back story was still very interesting. After the movie, we went though a bunch of wushu clips that I had, then some on youtube, and then squeezed an episode of Arrested Development in (The “Nelly” episode, oh it feels so good to talk like this!). When Michele, Caralyne and Owen came back home, Caralyne had a lot of fun shooting all three of us. his fueled the inner child in Shahaub, and made him question why he doesn’t own Nerf weaponry. We know why, its because no one would be safe, and every crotch in a half mile radius would require medical attention. After a few rounds of destroying each other, Mark and Shahaub left to meet Chase and his family for dinner.
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Back filling some older blog entries
Monday, Mar 30, 2009 9:09AM / Standard Entry
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Harman Kardon AVR 254
Monday, Mar 30, 2009 2:03AM / Standard Entry
It is no secret that I love watching movies in the comfort of my own living room. I get to eat what I want, drink and not have to worry about driving, and most of the time I’m by myself so I don’t have to worry about shushing people. What can I say, its a great way for me to recharge and get lost for a few hours.
Since I upgraded my HTPC to playback the new high definition formats, Blu Ray and HD DVD, I’ve come across a few little hiccups and had to re-think how I was going to get the most out of my setup. Some hiccups are just part of the new format, like decoding Dolby TrueHD/Dolby Digital Plus/DTS HD/DTS HD Master, the whole “trusted path” for the audio and video (HDMI output). Others were limitations of my equipment and what others were willing to put up with (both Michele and Caralyne did not welcome using a computer to playback movies). So as I started refining things, I new I needed and wanted a few things:
- HDMI Switch for both the HD DVD stand-alone player, and for the HTPC
- HDMI 1.3a support
- A working remote (my old Pioneer remote is busted, in pieces)
- Support for decoding the new HD audio formats
- A working FM receiver (Michele’s request, the pioneer was never able to pick up a FM station)
- Multi Channel analog inputs (for uncompressed LPCM audio from the HTPC)
So for the last few months, I’ve started to read up on the very helpful avsforum.com forum (yet another redundant statement, I’m getting good at these), looking at current receivers, and all of the quirks. Since every consumer electronic device now is a computer with its own embedded OS, we now have to be concerned with our alarm clock panic’ing, or our TV’s seg faulting. Receivers are no longer an exception to this. They used to amplify speakers and transmit analog, then there was bitstream decoding, and now we have complicated HDMI switching and handshaking, high res audio formats, auto-eq features and full screen menu’s. So I was not surprised to see a 200+ page thread dedicated to the HK AVR x54’s problems. Some of them were terrifying, with audio popping, black HDMI screens, all the stuff I was not interested in. There has been a new firmware update though, and that seemed to fix a lot of the issues, and while there were a lot of posts describing these issues, there were a lot of happy Harman Kardon owners. I’d like to add myself to that list, because so far everything has worked GREAT.
My Environment
Here is a quick rundown of the hardware and software I’m using
hardware
- Samsung HLR5067W DLP TV (720p/1080i)
- Toshiba HDA3 HD DVD player
- HTPC
- Intel DP35DP Motherboard (Intel P35 Chipset)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66Ghz
- 2GB DDR2 memory
- 1
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Let The Right One In
Sunday, Mar 29, 2009 4:00AM / Standard Entry
Let the Right One In is a very memorable horror movie. It’s in the vein (HA!) of a vampire movie, yet it never really addresses the question and creatively dodges it.
The two characters are a boy and a girl. Oskar and Eli. The young boy lives in an apartment complex with his single (and very absent) mother. Like most boys, he has a bully problem. He is also awkward and anti-social, which makes him a fine target bot both the bully, and Eli.
Eli is a 12 year old “girl”, though there is some ambiguity there. She shows up with her “Father” one evening at the same Apartment Oskar lives in. She and Oskar develop a friendship, and it starts to become obvious there is an ulterior motive. Eli is 12 years old, indefinitely, and she needs a new caretaker.
This isn’t your standard Vampire movie, where its full of cheesy Freudian-isms. My Mom complained about how awful she thought Twilight was. My Mother is into horror movies, and she’s always enjoyed a good Vamipre movie. I recommended this one to her, it’s very simple, and very cold (really, it will make you feel chilly). It’s also a Swedish movie, so prepare to read a little.
